Arts & Culture \ Speculative New Modern Art Gallery, Edinburgh

Speculative Proposals for a New National Galleries of Scotland Gallery of Modern Art in East Princes Street Gardens

The relocation of the Modern Art Gallery from Inverleith House in the Royal Botanical Gardens to the former John Watsons Institution on Belford Road in the 1980’s, and later into the adjacent Dean Orphan Hospital (rebranded today as Modern 1 and 2 respectively), was a brave move but visitor numbers are much less than those for the Mound galleries and the Portrait Gallery. Selling both the Modern 1 and 2 buildings for a residential development in the manner of the recent conversion and development at Donaldsons would finance a new purpose designed Modern Art Gallery in East Princes Street Gardens.

This project, (albeit designed without the benefit of consultation with the NGS), shows galleries connecting to the lower foyer of the NGS/RSA concourse and a second entrance, café, and shop opening directly off Waverley Bridge. The wall length would exceed the combined equivalent of Modern 1 & 2, the remaining lower lawn could be exclusive to the gallery and accommodate sculpture and the putting green, which existed 30 years ago on the site, could be re-born and placed on the roof. We might imagine that the increase in visitor numbers to the relocated gallery, especially from the Waverley Bridge entrance, would transform the NGS’s problem of “too few visitors” into potentially “too many!”